Mr Howard told reporters in Sydney he expected there would be "a very significant discussion about climate change" at the meeting. "This will be the first and best opportunity for the two largest polluters in the world - the United States and China - to come together," he said.

"At a lot of these other meetings, the Americans and the Chinese aren't sitting down together, except as part of the enormous concourse of everybody in the United Nations' ambit."

Australia and the United States are the only major developed countries not to have ratified the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which Mr Howard maintains is not an effective long-term response to climate change.

The prime minister has previously been labelled a climate change sceptic and criticised as a latecomer to the debate for not recognising climate change in specific policy terms until this year. Mr Howard this year said he was a climate change realist and denied he was ever a climate change sceptic. "I'm not suggesting we are going to solve the problem of climate change at APEC, but I do think it will be a principal point of discussion," he said. "Having both China and the United States around the same table is a huge advantage."

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